


Keep Calm And Enjoy Fall

by stevergrsno (noxlunate)



Series: Happy Steve Bingo Fills [7]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Autumn, Barista Bucky Barnes, Captain America Steve Rogers/Modern Bucky Barnes, Coffee, Fluff, Halloween, Happy Steve Bingo, Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pumpkins, Thanksgiving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 02:08:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16108565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noxlunate/pseuds/stevergrsno
Summary: “Ha! I told you. Stick around til the end of my shift Rogers. We’re going on an adventure and I’m going to make youfallin love with fall.”Steve cringes and Bucky looks far too pleased with his terrible pun.“That was horrible. You’re horrible. Oh my god, who lets you speak?”“I’ll have you know I’ve gotten Best Barista for six months in a row. Peopleloveme.”Aka Barista Bucky Barnes teaches Steve Rogers how to appreciate the season of pumpkin.





	Keep Calm And Enjoy Fall

**Author's Note:**

> Here is my fill for the Happy Steve Bingo square "Deciduous (Falling Leaves/Trees In Autumn)" It's soft and sweet and fluffy and I hope you like the tale of how Steve Rogers learns to appreciate fall!

Steve notices sometime around the beginning of October. It's nothing big, not even a big realization when it comes down to it.

It’s just that people seem _obsessed_ with fall.

Steve's never paid much attention to the seasons beyond them being something to complain about when it’s too hot or too cold. He _is_ a new Yorker after all, and bitching about the weather is practically in his blood.

People, however, seem obsessed with it. He’s stumbled across more than a few groups of people taking pictures of the trees lining the street, or stopped to take pictures of what he’s learned are pumpkin spice lattes and are apparently A Big Deal.

“I just don’t _get it_ .” He tells the barista at his normal coffee stop. His nametag has a jack-o-lantern sticker on it beside the normal scrawl of _Bucky_ and the elastic that holds his hair back is orange with black polka dots. Steve stops in his rant and _stares._ “Oh my god, you’re one of _them.”_ Steve says, aghast as Bucky rings up his order without Steve even having to tell him.

“If you’d been born in 1990 instead of 1918 you’d probably get it a little more.” Bucky says, ignoring Steve’s scathing tone over Bucky being one of the people going nuts over _a season._ Sure, the colors are great, but everything’s dead leaves and pumpkin spice and Steve feels the distinct urge to act like the crotchety old man everyone thinks he is when faced with it.

“Really?” He asks, instead of expressing any of his disbelief that he’d understand.

“Sure. It’s all at least half a nostalgia thing for a lot of us,” Bucky throws over his shoulder as he takes a cup and starts working on Steve’s drink. “We grew up with Halloween movies and fondly remember trick-or-treating and dancing to Monster Mash at our 4th grade Halloween parties. It’s nice to revel in it a little, y’know? It doesn’t hurt that pumpkin everything is tasty as hell and the colors of everything are beautiful. Besides, it’s kinda poetic. Y’know, the leaves falling and everything preparing to go dormant for the winter so that it can all start anew in the winter?”

Steve stares for a long moment, his lips tugging up just slightly despite himself. “You really are one of them.” He doesn’t think he sounds anywhere close to scathing this time though. It’s hard to be a dick when his favorite barista/kind of possibly maybe a friend in this century looks so happy.

“Basic Bitch Bucky Barnes at your service.” Bucky says with a grin as he hands over Steve’s coffee. “Now, drink that and try to tell me that pumpkin doesn’t deserve it’s rightful place as one of the stars of fall.”

“This isn’t my order.” Steve accuses after taking a suspicious sniff.

“Technically you didn’t order.” Bucky says, utterly unrepentant, “Now take a drink. I promise you’ll love it.”

Steve does. It’s not horrible. It’s spicy and sweet and the coffee still shines through. It’s not even close to horrible.

Godammit.

Bucky’s staring at him, clearly waiting for a reaction, and Steve finally sighs and relents.

“It’s good.”

“Ha! I told you. Stick around til the end of my shift Rogers. We’re going on an adventure and I’m going to make you _fall_ in love with fall.”

Steve cringes and Bucky looks far too pleased with his terrible pun.

“That was horrible. You’re horrible. Oh my god, who lets you speak?”

“I’ll have you know I’ve gotten Best Barista for six months in a row. People _love_ me.”

 

Steve sticks around, settles into a comfortable chair and drinks his coffee while sketching absently to wile away the time. By the time Bucky’s off his shift Steve’s filled two pages with quick sketches of his fellow customers and has finished his entire coffee.

“You’re an artist and you don’t appreciate fall? Have you no shame?” The voice is sudden behind him, and Steve has a moment of confusion as to how the hell a _barista_ just snuck up on him. It passes as quickly as it came however as Bucky holds out a hand to help Steve up. “C’mon, adventure time Rogers.”

“Don’t you have better things to do than show a relic _The Joys of Fall_?” Steve questions even as he’s following Bucky out of the coffee shop and to the nearest subway station.

“I’m doing the world a public service. There’s nothing better than that.” Bucky says and there’s a curl to his smile and a note to his voice that makes Steve think he’s teasing him.

Steve finds he doesn’t really mind.

 

Bucky pulls him off the subway a few stops later and promptly starts in the direction of the park.

“My adventure is the park?”

“Yes. Now stop complaining, you’re an American hero, you can handle a walk in the park.”

“Maybe I can’t. Maybe it’s all propaganda and I’m secretly very fragile.”

“I’ve watched you spill scalding hot coffee all over yourself and not even blink. I’m gonna go with you’re not fragile.”

They stop at a cart and Bucky orders two large hot chocolates then shoves one into Steve’s hands along with an obscenely sized cookie that Steve will not admit smells delicious. Then, he promptly starts dragging Steve along and into the park.

“I’m allergic to everything but black coffee.” Steve insists even as he drinks the hot cocoa.

“Wrong person to try that with bud, I was there for the Captain America Is Trying Our Entire Menu 2017 freakout from my managers.”

“Making friends with the person who makes my coffee was such a mistake.”

“You could always try making it yourself.”

“I broke my coffee pot.”

“And you can’t get a new one?”

“I broke my coffee pot. Six times.”

“Jesus christ you’re a disaster. Drink your hot chocolate and admire the view. Just try to tell me it doesn’t make you want to embrace the fall merriment.”

Steve, for once in his life, follows orders and sips at his hot chocolate as he takes in the view around him.

It’s _nice._

He hasn’t exactly taken the time to really take in everything around him, and it wasn’t like he had the full spectrum of colors before the serum when he actually had the time to appreciate things _._

Everything’s orange and yellow and that shade of red Steve could never see properly before but fell in love with the moment he saw it painted on Peggy Carter’s lips, leaves falling from the trees and scattered on the ground in a blanket of warm hues. And it crunches pleasantly when he walks over it, led along by Bucky Barnes, who looks warm and comfortable and perfectly at ease as he bosses around Captain America in a burnt orange sweater.

“I plead the fifth.” Steve says, watching as Bucky takes a long drink of his hot chocolate before breathing in deep, his eyes fluttering closed.

It’s beautiful. _He’s_ beautiful.

“Bullshit.” Bucky says, dragging Steve along again, the leaves crunching under their boots as they go.

“It’s nice.” Steve relents, casting a sideways glance at Bucky, “What’s next in the plan to convince me of fall merriment?”

Bucky looks like he actually has to contemplate that for a moment, then with a tone of finality he says “Pumpkins,” with a serious nod.

“Pumpkins?”

“Pumpkins.”

“And we’re gonna what? Take them home on the subway?”

“What, you don’t have enough money to spring for an Uber?”

 

Steve springs for an Uber, though Bucky has to help him actually do it.

(“How do you not know how to get an _Uber?_ It’s an _Uber.”_

“Because I take the subway. Like a _normal_ human being.”)

He pays the ridiculous fee for the uber to drive them out of the city and to an orchard, realizes that there is apparently very little he’d deny Bucky Barnes and tries not to wonder just how bad a thing that is.

“I didn’t realize this trip was going to involve leaving the city.”

“You lived in DC.”

“Yeah, and that ended with discovering a secret terrorist organization hiding there.”

Bucky barks out a laugh as he jabs at Steve’s ribs to hand over the money for apple picking, which he’d somehow been convinced into doing on the ride there.

“God, you’re really not a nature guy are you?” He asks as Steve picks his way through the rows of apple trees, grabbing apples down from the trees at random and dumping them in the bag.

“Not really, no.” Steve says, flashing Bucky a wry grin, “I grew up in Brooklyn, so I wasn’t exactly exploring the woods as a kid. And I guess I did the nature thing in the war, but it was _the war,_ I wasn’t exactly enjoying myself, y’know? Sleeping in the dirt with a bunch of other assholes isn’t exactly my definition of enjoying nature.”

Bucky hums in understanding as he picks his apples with a lot more consideration than Steve had and drops them into the bag with much more care than Steve. “I spent the first 9 years of my life in Indiana.” He says to Steve’s absolute _horror._

“ _Indiana?”_

Bucky laughs, seeming entirely unbothered by Steve’s obvious horror as he bites into an apple, something that Steve feels like he’s _probably_ not supposed to be doing at a place that claims they can have only as many apples as they can fit into the bag they’ve been given.

“Only until I was 9. Then my parents split and my ma moved my sisters and I upstate with her parents. Then when I was 13 we ended up in Brooklyn.”

“I grew up in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn, and even more Brooklyn.” Steve says with a shake of his head, absolutely unable to imagine living in _Indiana._

“That’s why you’re the one with a statue in Prospect Park.”

“That’s why I’m the one who gets dicks graffitied on their statue in Prospect Park.”

“It adds character.”

“Sure, that’s what it adds.”

 

They take their apples and _four_ pumpkins back home to Steve’s place, because apparently Bucky shares a tiny sixth floor walk up with five other people and he doesn’t think anyone deserves to deal with his roommates, let alone an American hero.

Bucky seems to have no trouble making himself comfortable in Steve’s home, rifling through drawers and cabinets to find whatever he needs, and Steve tries not to find himself awestruck as he watches the man spread out newspaper on Steve’s table, line up knives and spoons and all sorts of other things alongside the pumpkins and then navigate through Steve’s streaming services until he finds a movie he’s assured Steve is a _true celebration of fall._

“Hocus Pocus?” Steve asks, watching the tv skeptically.

“Hocus Pocus.” Bucky assures as he takes Steve by the wrist and leads him over to the table, and then with great ceremony, announces, “We’re going to carve pumpkins.”

“You know we celebrated halloween in ye olden days too, right?”

“Clearly not enough.” Bucky says as he shoves an incredibly large knife into Steve’s hands, “Now get to carving and gutting.”

Steve obeys, carving out the top of his pumpkin and then pulling out the seeds and guts before he sets about tracing a pattern on the pumpkin and carving it out.

It’s strangely relaxing, and if his eyes every so often find the tv screen, well, that’s between him and the Sanderson sisters.

 

Steve figures that after the day of fall excursions Bucky will be done with his insistence on swaying Steve to the ‘fall side.’

Steve is wrong. Steve is _very_ very wrong.

Bucky drags him to a harvest festival where they eat too many pumpkin flavored things and Bucky gets drunk on hard apple cider. He forces a variety of fall drinks onto Steve every time Steve doesn’t specify his coffee order, and insists on feeding Steve increasingly more bizarre fall treats. He strong arms Steve into attending a Halloween party dressed as a baseball player, and to Steve’s delight absolutely no one there recognizes him, or if they do they keep it quiet.

He thinks after the party that now, _now_ he must be done, but Bucky informs him on November 1st that Halloween is but one part of fall. The best, and most important part, according to Bucky, is _Thanksgiving._

Steve, who doesn’t exactly have a family to do holidays with and who has read the whole dirty history of Thanksgiving, thinks he might be overstating things a little.

“I’m _not.”_ Bucky insists on the ride across Brooklyn to Bucky’s ma’s house. “You’ve never had my ma’s Thanksgiving dinner Steve. You’ve never been blessed with the riches that are abounding the Barnes family dinner table one night and one night only. You’ve never tasted the joy of the evening leftover sandwich. You’ll understand.”

 

Steve _understands._ Winifred Barnes is a force to be reckoned with. A force that cooks like an angel and loads Steve’s plate up no less than five times, insisting that the good lord gave him a superhero’s metabolism and he better take advantage of it by being well fed. Steve can’t say no. Steve doesn’t _want_ to say no.

After, he and Bucky end up sprawled across the Barnes’ living room floor, hands pressed against their stomachs and the low noise of the game on tv a comforting murmur in the background.

“Have I wooed you yet?” Bucky asks, propping himself up on one elbow and looking down at Steve. _Yes,_ Steve thinks, even as Bucky quickly continues with “To the side of fall that is. Have I wooed you to the side of fall?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think I might be officially a fall lover.” Steve finally admits, because how can he be anything else, surrounded by the warmth of Bucky’s family, with Bucky in front of him, soft and warm and solid.

“Thank god. I wasn’t sure what other stops I could pull out to make it happen.”

“You gonna convince me of the magic of Christmas too?” Steve asks, teasing.

“Fuck no, I’m gonna convince you of the joys of Hanukkah.” Bucky says and Steve, with the sight of Bucky smiling above him, can’t help himself.

He pulls at Bucky’s shoulder, drags the other man down for a kiss, warm and vaguely pumpkin flavored. Bucky falls to meet him, and Steve, like the leaves on the trees that Bucky’s managed to convince him are magical, falls too.

 

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this come scream with me about things on [tumblr!](http://stevergrsno.tumblr.com/tagged/my-writing)


End file.
